Compared to the significantly long history of land acquisition and real estate the time that the internet has existed measures up to a mere blip on the timeline. However, the significance of the internet and it’s utility is anything but a blip and it’s here to stay. So one may wonder “What does the internet do for those who live by real estate?” If you look at what goes into investing you’ll see that the internet plays an ever growing role in the way things are done and where you can take your business up a notch. In general real estate investors have 6 different concerns: Presence, Finding Buyers, Finding Sellers, Finding Private Investors, Networking, and Education.

In this section I will be covering how to utilize the internet to increase your presence and to find buyers to increase you buyer’s list. Fortunately these also prove as a good introduction to facilitate your understanding of the latter four concerns.

Building a presence; without a presence in this business you are simply without business and that is something that you want to overcome immediately. With the proliferation of internet users the internet has become a first stop for the population at large for information on services, products, and information. With this in mind we are looking at traffic, and not just any old traffic, but traffic that is looking for real estate. Whether its information, properties in their area, or someone that can help them with their short sale the numbers are out there. Thus, you want a presence where you can put your best foot forward 24/7, 365 where all the traffic is.

It is important to note that the internet is extremely chaotic, yet organized and you must take certain measures to separate yourself from the rushing river of information. For instance there are numerous things that you can do to direct the kind of traffic that you want to your website and it’s as simple as going out and getting it from craigslist.

Presence is the foundation of any marketing effort that you do whether you’re finding deals or simply networking, a presence must exist for anyone to follow up with you or obtain information about your services or inventory. It’s always worth considering what effects that different presentations offers, and marketing will have on your presence. One key to it all is consistency and that the internet provides a two way street where people you have met in real life will go to your site for more information, and on the other side of the coin, people who like what they see online are willing to meet with you in real life. So it adds an extra dimension to your presence being on the internet at all.

A great illustration and exercise in presence can be seen when you consider the task of finding buyers and building your buyers list. The other week I had written a couple posts on using autoresponders

Here I cover some points that autoresponders expand your presence in ways that were darn near impossible before. One of the greatest bits of insight you’ll get when it comes to marketing real estate on the internet is that it has traditionally been found that buyers are much easier to get results with than sellers. Buyers go to the internet because they know there are an incredible amount of options and opportunities for them and with the internet they are able to zero in on what they are looking for with ease. It’s important to keep in mind that buyer leads are more time sensitive because once they find what they want they’re out of the market. With an auto-responder it’s easy to broadcast updates to your list of buyers and you can include a link to forward your list of properties and updates to a friend. Last but not least, then a buyer is out of the market they can simply click ‘unsubscribe’ so you know that you’ll have a more accurately current list.

Having a presence in the world of search will provide you with opportunities to come across buyers that you hadn’t even marketed to, that simply found you through one search or another. Again the road goes both ways, you may meet someone out of the blue who mentions they are looking for a place, or that is underwater for that matter, and you can strike a chord with them, hand them your card with your website on it and they can see one of the properties you were suggesting.

There is another consideration worth mentioning that involves your rehabber buyers list, but we’ll save that for the networking section, but you can only begin to image...

In my next post I will be covering finding sellers and finding investors with the power of the internet.

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